The only thing standing between impoverished rural Indians and total physical collapse is the good will of international sugar-water conglomerate PepsiCo, which soon hopes to be making $30 billion a year by selling "good for you" products to people so desperate that they will turn to PepsiCo to find something good for them. "Good," in this context, means "not Pepsi cola." Please allow the WSJ to present tonight's specials at the Rural Indian PepsiCo Cafe:

The healthy-foods initiative is focused on dairy, juices and products like oatmeal but in a first for the Purchase, N.Y., company, it has developed three new products targeting the poor-a 24-gram, or 0.84 ounce, pack of half a dozen cookies; a 10-gram pack of spicy puffs made with rice, cornmeal and millet; and a 200-milliliter, or 6.8-ounce, noncarbonated energy drink called Gluco Plus, which contains glucose, electrolytes and iron. It says others are in the pipeline.

Mmm, glucolicious. Those health cookies will totally outsell nature's boring entry into the category, "a vegetable." The WSJ notes that "The target [of the food campaign] is adolescent girls," and then quotes PepsiCo India's chief as saying "we need to penetrate the bottom of the pyramid."

Is PepsiCo is coming to booty-rape your daughters with cookies? Well, it's for their own good.

[WSJ. Photo: tehzeta/ Flickr]